The Business Times Weekend to Launch its iPad App on 1 Oct

SINGAPORE - The Business Times Weekend (BT Weekend), the weekend edition of Singapore’s leading financial daily The Business Times (BT), will launch its new iPad application on Saturday, 1 October. The launch of this app also marks The Business Times’ 35th anniversary.

The BT Weekend app comes ahead of a universal app on iPad and iPhone for the weekday edition of BT, expected in the coming months.

The new BT Weekend iPad app comes with a PDF format of the BT Weekend print edition. For a start, the 1 October and 8 October issues of the BT Weekend can be accessed for free.

Starting from 15 October, each issue will cost US 99 cents to download and it will be valid for seven days. The BT Weekend iPad app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store from 6.00am. The app name is “The Business Times Weekend”.

This digital subscription is automatically renewed when the app for the following week’s issue of the BT Weekend is downloaded. Subscribers will have access to past issues of BT Weekend that they had previously downloaded successfully.

The BT Weekend print edition was re-launched in a compact format on 6 September 2008. The Business Times has a daily circulation of 38,400 copies, as of August 2011.

The BT Online edition was first introduced in June 1995, the first English-language newspaper in Asia to go online. Since January 2000, BT Online has been available from 4.00 am Singapore time (GMT +8 hrs) and continues to offer news updates throughout the day, from Mondays to Saturdays.

Alvin Tay, Editor of The Business Times, said: "We are delighted to mark our 35th anniversary with the launch of BT Weekend on the iPad. We know that BT readers are avid consumers of business news through digital and mobile platforms. We want to reaffirm our position as the most authoritative source of business and financial news in Southeast Asia.”

Mr Patrick Daniel, Editor-in-Chief, English and Malay Newspapers Division, said: “We have ambitious plans for BT's online and digital offerings. The BT Weekend for the iPad is just the start. I foresee that the next 12 months will be an exciting period for BT and our readers."